This column by Neil W. McCabe was published October 2, 2016 by Breitbart News.

Virginia’s election officials are enabling illegal registration and voting by foreign citizens, according to an extensive new study, titled “Alien Invasion in Virginia,” by a former Department of Justice civil rights lawyer.

“Virginia election officials don’t seem to care that thousands of [foreign] aliens have corrupted their voter rolls,” by illegally registering to vote, said J. Christian Adams, the former Department of Justice lawyer, and now the president of the Public Interest Legal Foundation. “Even worse than doing nothing about it, they are trying to cover it up,” he told Breitbart News.

Even small amounts of illegal voting can make a decisive difference — Democratic Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring defeated Republican Mark Obenshain in 2013 by a mere 165 votes out of 2.2 million votes cast.

But “in the eight [out of 130-plus] jurisdictions that provided us with lists of aliens recently removed from their voter rolls, we discovered that 31 non-citizens had cast a total of 186 votes between 2005 and 2015,” said the report, given first to Breitbart News.

“This is just a fraction of the aliens caught in just eight counties in a state with over 130 counties,” Adams said. “Even with such a small sample, the number of aliens who got on the voter rolls is staggering. The aliens are casting ballots in a state where elections have been decided by a few hundred votes.”

State-wide, “the problem is most certainly exponentially worse [than seen in the eight localities] because we have no data regarding aliens on the registration rolls for the other 125 Virginia localities,” the report said. “When the voting history of this small sample of alien registrants is examined, nearly 200 verified ballots were cast before they were removed from the rolls. Each one of them is likely a felony.”

The authors highlighted the role played by Edgardo Cortés, the commissioner of the commonwealth’s department of elections.

Before his appointment by Democratic Gov. Terence McAuliffe, Cortés was a left-wing operative of Virginia Voting Rights Restoration Campaign, within the left-wing Advancement Project. The project was funded and supported by George Soros, through his Tides Foundation and Open Society Foundations.

The report makes the direct charge: “At the instruction of Commissioner Cortés, local election officials refused to provide us with records showing the voting history of non-citizens removed from registration lists.

Previous to McAuliffe taking office in 2014, state officials had used the federal Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements database, it is also known as the SAVE database, to detect and remove aliens from the voting rolls, the report said.

One of the top priorities of the Soros’ Advancement Project is to stop the use of SAVE to purge voter lists.

“The state Board ‎of Elections, which has a 2-to-1 Democrat majority told local election officials to ignore our investigation, even though federal law gives PILF the right to inspect documents listing the aliens who were quietly removed from the rolls,” he said.

The report points to the federal 1993 National Voter Registration Act, known by its “Motor Voter” moniker, which compelled states to register as a voter anyone who presents a driver’s license and checks a box attesting that they are an American citizen. The law does not require any other evidence, and in several states, such as Alabama, Georgia and Kansas, the Department of Justice and or left-wing operatives have sought to block efforts to tighten citizenship verification.

But the Motor Voter law also requires officials to maintain records and to strip ineligible voters from the rolls. So the voters’ alliance asked officials for copies of voters’ records to gauge their eligibility.

In January, the Virginia Voters Alliance requested City of Alexandria registrar Anna Leider to produce voter records, but Leider refused.

In April, the Public Interest Legal Foundation, on behalf of VVA and Alexandria citizen David Norcross, filed suit in federal court. When the case came to the courtroom, Leider promised the court she would allow VVA and Norcross to inspect her records–an inspection, which revealed hundreds of non-citizens on the voter rolls. But, Leider’s cooperation ended there, as she stopped the VVA representatives from making a photocopy of the list, according to the report’s authors.

Eight months later, Leider’s lawyer produced a list of just 70 aliens her office had removed from the rolls, according to the report.

Election officials at Prince William County provided VVA with the names of 433 non-citizens, who had been registered to vote in the county, but had been later removed, the report said.

Barbara Gunter, the general registrar of Bedford County, which has roughly 60,000 voting age citizens, produced at list of 35 names of illegal voters on the rolls. She also gave up the names of additional 54 voters who were sent notices that they need to validate their eligibility. But soon after her response to VVA and PILF, Gunter called PILF requesting that they destroy the list. She asked for the list to be destroyed because Cortés, the state elections commissioner, claimed she violated the federal Drivers Privacy Protection Act.

This process was repeated in Roanoke County, which produced a list 22 illegal voters. Then the county’s General Registrar Judith Stokes emailed PILF to request the destruction of the list upon the guidance of Cortés, according to the report.

Following Roanoke’s email, all of the other 17 jurisdictions with pending requests for voter records contacted VVA and PILF to say that Cortés told them not to honor the requests, each citing concerns for driver privacy, according to the report.

The report says the coverup was exposed when Cortés took his next step, which insist that all requests of voter records would be processed through his state office. Tn his own correspondence with VVA and PILF, the commissioner said his consolidation was meant to relieve local offices of the administrative burden and to ensure that individual’s privacy concerns were addressed.

Cortés final offer to VVA and PILF is that he will promise to provide some information, but nothing relating to illegal voters and the purging of illegal voters.

Adams told Breitbart News, the abuses and cover up in Virginia is just the tip of the iceberg, not only in Virginia, but across the country.

The voting rights attorney said the VVA and PILF groups did their job by naming names, by citing the actions and inaction, of state and local election officials.

It is important to remember that the report describes violations of state and federal laws that have yet to be addressed by state and federal law enforcement, he said.

“Soros fueled groups like the NAACP‎, Democrats and Advancement Project are in court now opposing citizenship verification measures,” he said.

For years the Left has dismissed suspicions that non-citizens are voting, he said. “Now, we know why,” the lawyer said.

“When an alien registers to vote, it is a felony,” Adams said. “When an alien votes, it is multiple felonies. DOJ under Obama has stopped enforcing this law. We name the names of the registered voters removed from the rolls for citizenship problems. Will DOJ prosecute any of them?”

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